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The Half Healed

This book of poetry was the outworking of a long period of research, beginning with an opera libretto commissioned by Welsh National Opera with composer James MacMillan. This opera, The Sacrifice, was based on a contemporary re-working of a Welsh myth from the Mabinogion, concerning civil conflict (a blood feud between the island of Britain and the island of Ireland) and subsequent attempts at reconciliation. Working with National Theatre Associate Director Katie Mitchell, the creative team read transcripts of interviews and heard recorded accounts (via the BBC archives) of civil conflict from many angles - combatants, civilians, journalists, psychologists - focusing particularly on Bosnia. After the opera libretto was finished, MSR continued to research in this same field (conflict and resolution) with more eyewitness reports from BBC archives (particularly concerning Rwanda), and attendance (and delivering keynote) at the London University (School of Advanced Study) 2010 Mellon Sawyer Seminar series, "Fratricide & Fraternité: Understanding and Repairing Neighbourly Violence." This research fed directly into the poems in The Half Healed, a collection of individual poems set in an unspecified European state attempting reconciliation after civil conflict. The role of hotels in civil conflict (as places of refuge, headquarters buildings, places where truces are signed) has been well documented (eg Hotel Rwanda - 2004) and an invented hotel is the location of many of the poems in The Half-Healed, including several sonnets exploring reconciliation and betrayal through the prism of a couple meeting as lovers in the hotel. The attempt to describe conflict and its aftermath in extended poetic sequence led MSR into a process of research into the early modernist poets working in this territory, in particular In Parenthesis and The Anathemata by David Jones. The research for this book was supported by a Writers Award from the UK Arts Council.